Last week (October 29–31, 2026) was the 2026 American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Earlier, in my preview of what I was looking forward to, I pointed to three sessions I was watching for software companies, covering trade secrets and artificial intelligence (AI), copyright in useful works, and AI license terms. All three were worth the trip, as were the other sessions I attended on trade secret mega-verdicts, non-traditional trademarks, look-alike “dupe” products, and design rights for software interfaces.
True to the meeting’s theme, “IP Horizons: Navigating Innovation, AI, and Global Change,” AI came up in nearly every session, and so did advice about keeping records, especially of how you use AI: prompt histories and clean-room records in trade secret cases, AI terms in the contract instead of a later fight, and signed assignments from every designer. Record keeping like this is cheap to do now and expensive to reconstruct in the middle of a dispute.
Here are my six AIPLA Annual Meeting 2026 takeaways most worth the attention of software developers and companies.
Document Your AI Prompts to Protect Trade Secrets
Under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, information that someone could readily figure out through proper means isn’t a trade secret, and AI tools can now work out a lot from what your product shows the public. AI also makes fast independent development believable. If you’re accused of misappropriation, a clean-room process and your engineers’ prompts can be your best evidence, and those prompt histories may come out in discovery. The same records can help you register AI-assisted code.
Put AI Terms in Your NDAs and Terms of Service
Scraping a public website with bots can still be an “improper means” of taking a trade secret, and companies are already suing over prompts built to trick AI systems into revealing their instructions. Trade secret law alone may not be enough. Consider saying in your NDAs and license agreements whether the other side can put your confidential information into AI tools or point them at your software, and backing up public terms of service with anti-scraping measures.
Trade Secret Damages Must Fit the Secrets Proved
Appeals courts are cutting some big trade secret verdicts and restoring others, including between software companies. Whether the theory is actual loss, unjust enrichment, or a reasonable royalty, the awards that hold up tie damages to the specific secrets proved. If you rely on trade secret protection instead of patents, it helps to build that into how the company runs, starting with a list of each secret and its value. If you suspect misappropriation, it pays to move quickly, because the federal three-year deadline has erased a nine-figure verdict.
AI License Agreement Terms to Spell Out
In an AI license agreement, a bare right to “use” the product leaves the hard questions for later. A good license addresses each permission separately: deployment; fine-tuning on your data; ownership of fine-tuned models, improvements, and outputs; the provider’s right to train on customer data; and third-party claims. Copyright requires a human author, so an “owns all outputs” clause may transfer nothing. Consider assigning output copyright “to the extent it exists” instead. An indemnity is only as good as the company behind it. You may want to ask your vendor where its training data came from, too.
IP Assignments for Designs in the EU and at Home
EU copyright can now cover ordinary product designs, including hardware and interfaces, with no artistic-value test. It can protect U.S. designs even where U.S. law would not, for the designer’s life plus 70 years. Because those rights start with the individual designer, it is important to get a signed intellectual property (IP) assignment from every employee and contractor who creates a design, and keep dated documentation of the design process. At home, too, a contractor who writes your code generally owns the IP rights unless a signed agreement says otherwise.
GUI Design Patents Are Easier to Get
Under USPTO guidance issued in March, a GUI or icon design no longer has to show a display screen if the claim ties it to a computer, and AR, VR, and projected interfaces can qualify. The guidance doesn’t bind courts, so consider showing a device in the drawings anyway. Trade dress is a harder fit, because interface features that improve usability can count as functional. If you plan to file abroad, filing before launch is safer, since China generally gives no grace period.
If any of these touch your business, now is a good time to look at your NDAs, AI vendor contracts, and assignment paperwork, before litigation forces the question. We’re glad to talk any of them through, so please reach out.
– John
